Game jam sprites — ship the jam, not the pixels.
When the clock's running on Ludum Dare, GMTK, or a weekend jam, the art is the bottleneck — not the code. Upload a photo (you, your jam team) and get a recognizable 4-direction walk pack in minutes. Drops straight into Godot or Unity. $5, one-time, no account.
The art is the bottleneck — not the code
You know the jam feeling: 48 hours on the clock, the mechanic's working, the loop is fun — and you've got a magenta box standing in for the player because nobody on the team can pixel a walk cycle by Sunday. The code moves fast when you're vibe-coding; the character art doesn't. So the placeholder ships, or you burn your last six hours in Aseprite instead of polishing the game.
PixelForge is the shortcut. Bring a photo of a real person — you, a teammate, your team mascot — and get back a recognizable 4-direction walk pack in minutes. The placeholder becomes a character, and you get those six hours back for the part the judges actually score.
A face to a walking character, fast
→ your character
It's a real photo in, a recognizable character out — not a stranger a prompt happened to describe. PixelForge keeps the cues that read at 48 pixels (hair, glasses, shirt color, build) so your jam hero is unmistakably that person.
How to get a jam character in minutes
Upload one photo
A clear, front-facing portrait of a single person — you or a teammate.
Pay $5 — no account
One-time $5 through Stripe. No sign-up, no subscription, no credits to ration.
Drop the ZIP in your engine
Unzip and wire it up — engine-agnostic files for Godot, Unity, or the web.
No account, minutes, $5. Generated by an AI model, then finished by code — background truly removed, feet aligned to one baseline, 16 frames trued and sliced — so it drops in clean instead of arriving as a grey box you have to fix mid-jam.
Cast your whole jam team
One photo each turns your team into the cast of the game — a recognizable, aligned, ready-to-walk character per person.
What's in your $5 pack
Honest scope: PixelForge makes one playable character per photo — a 4-direction walk pack. It doesn't generate tilesets, items, UI, or your whole game's art. It does the character your jam couldn't, and does it fast.
Frequently asked questions
Most packs are ready in minutes — upload a front-facing photo, pay $5, and download the ZIP. There's no account to create and no queue to sign up for, which is the whole point during a 48-hour jam: you forge the character and get back to building.
Yes — run one photo per person and each teammate becomes their own recognizable 4-direction character. It's $5 per character, one-time, so a four-person team is four uploads and four packs. Great for making the cast of the game your actual team.
Yes. You get a transparent PNG 4×4 sheet, 16 individual frames, 4 direction strips, and 4 looping walk GIFs — engine-agnostic files that work in Godot, Unity, Phaser, or plain web. The README covers wiring it up, and there's a Godot walkthrough if that's your stack.
Yes — the pack is yours to ship in commercial and non-commercial games, with no per-title or royalty fees. So if your jam prototype turns into a real release, the character comes with it. See the commercial use & licensing page for the details.
$5 per character, one-time. No account, no subscription, no credits — and you're refunded if a pack fails QA (handled manually during beta). One photo, one walk pack, one charge.
Put anyone into your game.
$5 · one photo · 4-direction walk pack · no subscription
Make a sprite — $5